Hello all! You can call me Mace, I'm from an tiny secluded town in the Pacific Northwest, and in exactly 5 days i will be legal to smoke, gamble, and sign up for a credit card. Not that I plan to do any of them, unless of course you have a turkish chocolate cigar handy. Damn they're good (IMG:style_emoticons/default/thumbsup.gif)

I've been interested in the occult (magick, otherkin, etc...) since i was very young. I've first dabbled in the occult about two and a half years ago, then off and on since then, though whenever I've started to get serious i then proceed to be swept up in other events going on in my life. I believe that ritualistic magic is very effective for myself as it tends to focus my easily distracted mind. I am ,however, more interested in those more direct paths to manipulating the world around us.

I would be grateful to anyone who is willing to share effective methods for balancing oneself. I believe that some of my attributes result from some kind of inbalance. For instance: my temperature hovers around 96.8, and my blood pressure is 58/104. Stimulants and depressants have inverse effects on me, caffeine=sleep, alcohol=energetic. Strangely I seem to have no pressure points. My body metabolises things very quickly. I have a mild case of OCPD and I test out as highly gifted. I pan out as a highly gifted procrastinator.

As far as paranormal experiences, I have had a few minor run ins but nothing extraordinary. I talked to some kind of entity(ghost or otherwise) named Bones from ages 2-4. I would write it off as a normal imaginary friend, but my mother tells me that my conversations were much too fleshed out to be the product of a toddler, and that i could see this "Bones". Personally I have no recollection of this guy. Is there a way to tap into this former connection? I still live in the same house. At 4, my brother made me watch the movie Leprechaun, which really scared me at the time (now the little ugly thing is either funny or completely lame). So, from 4-12 I lived in fear of what the darkness held. Most of the time i was just paranoid, but several times i had real physical encounters with something. A product of my experiences from an earlier period of my life maybe? Who knows. At 15 I became extremely fascinated by vampires. A little surf online and I was among fellow teenagers who believed that they were BECOMING vampires (IMG:style_emoticons/default/zombie.gif) . Their signs of "awakening" were traits that i possessed (good night vision, low body temp, slow pulse, paleness, sharp canines, thirst for blood? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/whistling.gif) ) Luckily I decided that i wasn't an awakening blood sucker and resumed sunbathing. In Belgium,where i spent my junior year on exchange, (learned french, made some great friends, visited 50-100 bars, learned how to dress, and travelled a bit) I was however certifiably attacked by a vampire. I awoke briefly in the night to an opened window, a dark and distinctively female presence crushing me down, and a sharp pain in my neck before struggling briefly and falling back unconscious. The next morning i was incredibly weak and a quick look in the mirror revealed a set of bite marks on my neck. Whatever attacked me certainly wasn't a confused awakening adolescent so despite not being one, i have had a vampiric encounter.

Being in Belgium must have affected my biology somehow, because my body has been functioning differently ever since. I can no longer stay up for endless amounts of time without tiring(84 hours was my record), endure cold, or even apparently create psi balls. I've actually started to have normal reactions to medicine(never used to) which might actually be a positive. If you have an idea why these changes happened or how to reverse them I'd be happy to hear it.

Alrighty, I'll wrap it up with a normal short biography(probably should be at the beginning, huh?). I am the youngest cousin in an extended Catholic family of 50 (in a town with less than 1k people). I am a scholar-athlete, i play football, basketball, track, rugby(in Belgium), and golf, albeit my school being in the smallest sports classification (IMG:style_emoticons/default/showoff.gif) . I am President of the NHS and the student body. I'm a voracious reader, an occasional hunter, a music lover, a fitness freak, a song writer, an aspiring novelist, and a multi-college applicant(15of them). Lest you think I'm rich because of exchange, know that my mother is a janitor and my dad is 500 miles away and unemployed. I work for my money, I've done it for the past 4 years. And lest you think I'm arrogant, know that I'm homely(lots of acne)(got a spell for that?), introverted, and have too many other flaws to list.

Et voilà, finalement, le conclusion. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/004.gif)

There you have it. You now know me better than most of my family and certainly all of my friends. Any social veiling or dishonesty was stripped away for the writing of this. Perhaps in the reading of it, you've already grown to like or dislike me. If the latter, I urge you to please delay your final judgment. I'm not always like this. Promise.

Now that you know of some of my experiences, problems, and desires perhaps you'd care to share some insight?

(Why couldn't I have spent these words on writing an admissions essay?)